> And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion.

I disagree that this is objective at all.

But more importantly, I disagree that the smiley face is intended to be "representative" at all in the first place.

When USENET users typed ":)", do you suppose they cared about the text being black-on-white (or white-on-black, or green-on-black, or...) when their lips are actually red and their eyes might be any number of colours? No; the entire point was that you could convey "the foregoing is intended in a lighthearted way" in two bytes, and not spend many more bytes conveying information about your appearance (which you were more likely than not deliberately trying to conceal).

If for some reason the systems I used spontaneously changed so that the smiley-face emoji had a white skin tone that happened to match my own very well, and didn't offer any options to change that, I would not for a moment register any kind of feeling of "inclusion" or "representation". I would not care in the slightest about "huh, that looks like me". If I noticed at all, I would more likely be freaked out (why does the developer of this software know what I look like?).

Just like how, in the real world where there weren't options and the skin tone was that weird dark yellow, it never once occurred to me to complain, or feel insecure, about it not looking like me; nor did it occur to me to think about whether or not it was intended to look like me, or like a generic white person, or a generic person of any other race. These were just Not Issues Taking Up Mental Space until the Fitzpatrick modifiers were added to Unicode.

Also just like how, when I used the :mrgreen: emoji on ancient phpBB message boards (actually, the Linux Mint forums allow me to do this again!), I didn't think "but nobody is actually green", or "I wonder what race of person this is intended to be 'coded' as", or "if the yellow colour is actually 'white' then this green must be... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvsgEDKCgM".

I thought "oh, how whimsical".

And I can't come up with a mental justification for why people who aren't white should feel any differently about that sort of thing, that I could take at all seriously.